Wealth & Money Quote by Don Van Vliet

Toilet paper is a perfect Don Van Vliet subject: intimate, absurd, and revealing in the way a throwaway detail can act like a psychological scan. The line isn’t really about bathroom supplies; it’s about taste as pathology, and status as something so anxious it has to announce itself even in private. “You can almost judge how screwed up somebody is” lands like folk wisdom, but it’s also a trapdoor. He’s baiting you into a petty judgment, then exposing how quickly culture teaches us to read objects as moral evidence.

The punch is in the specificity: “weird coloured embossed stuff.” Color and embossing are design flourishes with no functional upgrade, just texture-as-signaling. Van Vliet aims it at “any rich house,” not because money automatically corrupts, but because wealth invites performative choices that drift into the uncanny. The bathroom, supposedly the most uncurated room, becomes another showroom. That’s the joke and the indictment: if you’re branding your wipe, you’re not relaxing; you’re managing an image.

As an artist who made a career out of refusing polish, Van Vliet is also defending a rougher authenticity. His distrust of the “embossed” mirrors his distrust of overproduced art: surfaces that insist on their own cleverness. The quote works because it’s crude without being empty, class-conscious without being programmatic, and it captures a whole critique of consumer culture in one vulgar, airtight snapshot.